Death and Resurrection

            I hate the Old Testament lesson from Genesis where God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac and offer him as a burnt offering.  It is really worse than that, God tells Abraham to take Isaac, the son whom you love, to the mountain in the land of Moriah and to offer him there.  Abraham obeys, takes Isaac, gathers up wood for the fire and they trudge on their way.  When they get to the spot, Abraham builds an altar, lays the wood on it, binds Isaac and puts him on top of the wood.  He then takes his knife and prepares to kill his son.  It is only then that God stops Abraham and shows him a ram caught in a thicket, which becomes the burnt offering.  God says to Abraham, do not do anything to the boy, or lay a hand on him, for now I know that you fear God because you have not withheld your only son from Him. This story would be horrible except for the story of the crucifixion of Jesus on the hill outside Jerusalem at the end of his ministry, when God did not withhold his only son from the sacrifice that brought all of us eternal life. 

            I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in my ministry with people who were dying.  I’ve gotten used to the things that are said to them and their survivors: “God never gives us more than we can handle”; “Everything is going to be OK”, are some of them and they are generally said by good people who are trying to help.  The problem is that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle, life does.  Sometimes events become so terrible that we can hardly imagine the pain.  I believe that one of the reasons for Jesus’ crucifixion is so that we can all know that God is in the most excruciating pain that life offers with all of us, all of the time.  There is nothing that we can go through that will exclude the presence of God with us.  That isn’t always easy to see.  Sometimes it is only seen in retrospect, when times have gotten better and we are able to look back.  Sometimes it is not seen at all and we are horrified by the seeming absence of God in the middle of our pain.  That doesn’t mean that God isn’t there; it only means that we can’t always see it.  Can you imagine the occupants of the World Trade Center after the planes crashed into the buildings trying to understand how God is present in that ghastly event?  People jumping from the heights of the building to their deaths wondering where God was and why God’s help was being withheld from them.  No wonder our faith suffers sometimes.  When terror strikes, it seems to have the upper hand.  We seem to be without resource.

            But remember the result of the crucifixion.  God indeed watched as Jesus died on the cross, but that wasn’t the end of the story.  That happened three days later with the empty tomb and the Resurrection.  That certainly wasn’t seen at the time by his apostles or by the women who had watched their Lord die.  But the Resurrection is a message for us that even though death is a certainty for all of us; eternal life is the great gift that God has for us.  Life out of death is a magnificent gift.  It is the one thing that we can rely on even in the face of tragedy.  If it doesn’t always resonate with us it is because we focus on our grief and not on God’s possibility.  I remember one woman who with her dying breath looked at me and said “I have never seen anything so beautiful.”  I have no idea what she saw in that moment, but it is enough for me.